Opposition “journalists” dishonestly liken situation in Afghanistan to that of the Philippines

This is a bit of a stretch. Joel Pablo Salud in his piece “It’s perfectly fine to sympathize with the Afghan people, but…” published on Licas News writes that “Afghan people and Filipinos today share one thing in common: both find themselves at a crossroads. Both must decide their people’s fate. And while Afghans are hard-pressed to stand against the Taliban, Filipinos, too, must realize their own responsibility to push back against Duterte’s tokhang regime.”

Saying the Philippines and Afghanistan are in the same boat just to be able to hit at President Rodrigo Duterte. This is why “journalist-activists” have little or no credibility at all. They don’t take into account public sentiment. What is important is only their own views. It’s ramming it down the public’s collective throats. There is also the issue of the lack of due process. We have seen this before with former Presidents Ferdinand Marcos and Joseph “Erap” Estrada. People power was “institutionalized.” Yet it is nothing more than an extra-judicial and extra-legal means of ousting a legitimately elected President from office.

Whatever these “journalist-activists” think, the Philippines is still a democratic country. The basic freedoms under the Bill of Rights continue to exist. There is no concerted effort by government to stop the public in the exercise of these basic freedoms. Leftist-militant groups are under pressure from the government but their links to Communists are there for the public to see. The public has made their judgment as well. The Anti-Terror Bill is not a fascist tool but helps the government protect the public from terrorists and terror attacks.

Salud would’ve been better off writing about the threat posed by Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists being an Islamic Emirate. This is serious because terrorism has waned the past years mostly due to ISIS being defeated by US forces and Bin Laden’s death a few years earlier. It also helped that ASEAN banded together to clamp down on the activities of these radical groups in their respective countries. Salud and his clique of left-leaning bohemians styling themselves as public intellectuals rings hollow like an empty drum. The opposition to Duterte hasn’t been able to present a solid case to the people in the past five years.

The truth is the government has been making gains against the communist insurgency both in the field and in the mainstream with their front organizations led by the party-list groups in Congress. It’s about time the public realizes that these leftist-militants are no different from termites that infest houses and slowly eat away from within. It is about time they are permanently eradicated from society. This is why there should be a concerted effort amongst the public to make them aware that they shouldn’t vote for these pests again on May 2022.

Ramon Ortoll

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